Nearing the end of my trip, I booted into Ubuntu and it reported that my laptop’s battery only had 34-36% effective life. There was over 60% degradation in one year of very little battery use. I had noticed the battery performance degrade and on maximum charge I was getting just under 2 hours. When I first got the laptop, I was hovering around 3-3.5 hrs, still less than what a 9cell should provide.

I gave Dell a call two days ago to report my issue and after a lengthy discussion with technical support, they offered to ship me a replacement battery. Not bad giving I had 2 days of warranty left at that time.

The new battery arrived this morning and it just finished its first charge.

new battery

New Battery Label (left) & Comparison of the batteries (right)

The original battery:

With a wear level of 63%, I was only managing 1 hour 50 minutes under idle conditions in windows.

The new battery:

With the new battery the full capacity is almost the same as the design capacity, short by only 200 mWh, unlike my original battery where the difference was around 55000mWh! Under full charge, the battery is slated to last in the range of 4.5 hours. This is under idle conditions, CPU throttling, wifi enabled and BlueTooth disabled. Once I get some new results, I will update with another post.

Once I hit the connect button on my mouse, I typed “sudo hidd –search” into shell and let it work its magic. After a few second it found the MAC ID that belonged to my MX1000. Another second later I was able to use my mouse in gnome.

Hopefully this helps someone out. I’ll try it with my Logitech diNovo Edge later. I really hope to get the bluetooth manager to pick up the devices on its own. This way I can get rid of my Logitech Bluetooth adapter and hopefully I will be able to sync my Dell Axim x50v to with Ubuntu.

To install the Java Plugin:

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-plugin

To install Adobe Flash Player 9

wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/10761023/flashplugin-nonfree_9.0.115.0ubuntu2_i386.deb

sudo dpkg -i flashplugin-nonfree_9.0.115.0ubuntu2_i386.deb

To round off Firefox, I also recommend getting the VLC plug-in so you can watch streaming videos.

sudo apt-get install mozilla-plugin-vlc

A quick restart of Firefox and everything should be ready to go. You can view your plug-ins by typing about:plugins into your address bar to see if the plugins are in fact available.

#!/bin/bash
smbmount //192.168.0.103/E /home/simon/p5e3/ smfs -o guest uid=simon 0 0

I don’t fully understand what the stuff at the end means, but here’s what I know.

smbmount is the application that’ll do the a mounting

//192.168.0.1.103/E is the E drive on my PC with IP 192.168.0.103 that I want to mount.

/home/simon/p5e3/ is the folder I want to mount the networked drive to

smfs is the file system. I’m taking a stab at this. If you’re copying and pasting this for your own use, leave it as it.

-o guest all I know about this is that by declaring it as a guest, I get full access to the networked E drive. That includes read, write and execute. I believe you can only do this if the network drive is public and the permissions are set on the NTFS to be read/write/executable.

uid=simon that’s be my login

0 0 probably has something to do with permission.

You can make the procedure more complicated by adding logins and passwords but that’s too much for your average home user, at least in my opinon.

Once you’ve made your script in gedit, vi, nano or with your favourite text editor, you’ll want to save it and rename it to .sh. Then you want to make it executable by typing chmod u+x filename.sh.

I made this file on my desktop and I just double click and run it everytime you need to get access to your network. I tried adding it to start up, /etc/rd.local but I believe that happens before the network is initialized and thus skips over the mounting step.

Here’s what you need:

TCL8.5: http://in.solit.us/archives/download/114664
TK8.5: http://chronos.solit.us/archives/download/113979
AMSN 0.97 stable: http://in.solit.us/archives/download/114530
TCLTLS1.50 http://in.solit.us/archives/download/115681

Install them using gdebi. You must install them in the order listed above and can uninstall TCL8.4 & TK8.4. Bonuses that PatrickofSpain include some extra skins, configuration tweaks and drag-and-drop into a conversation window for sending.